“”The problems that motivated identity political movements are not gone in 2012: Aboriginal cultures are often ignored in mainstream educational systems, violence against women still permeates our lives, “equality” for queer people is still typically premised on sameness to privileged heterosexual subjectivity, and so on. Nonetheless, the very term “identity politics” seems in many ways hopelessly outmoded. Models premised on categorical identification seem increasingly inadequate to the complexities of our becomings, and intra-group sameness as the basis of political solidarity feels not only exclusionary but also too heavily predicated on negation and loss.

Appeal to these shared commonalities, or disdain for similarly constituted groups seen as undesirable or aberrant, has likely been a feature of primate politics since before the emergence of Homo sapiens. It is not obvious from the broadest definition, but modern identity politics is often reputed (especially by the far right) to be a variant of Marxism. While it is true that Marxists have tended to support identity politics campaigns to some extent, and the rhetoric of identity politics advocates often references Marxist tropes, in many ways they are incompatible analyses. Some Marxist traditionalists explicitly denounce identity politics.[2] Identity politics has to a great extent replaced Marxism as the ideology associated with the hard political left in the West, although identity politics has been embraced by some elite "moderates" within the American power structure and informs some distinctly non-leftist movements such as Zionism and Islamism.

Identity politics is distinguishable from but similar to political nationalism. An ethnic (as opposed to economic) nationalist political movement asserts the unity of an ethnic identity and its entitlement to dominate a territory. Modern identity politics arises out of a claim that the universalist humanism developed by Enlightenment social philosophy, espousing equality and human rights and embraced by Westerndemocracies, is inadequate to actually achieve its stated goals. This is claimed to be due to a number of factors, including differing historical experiences, culture, and power relationships between groups that invariably lead to oppression, the systematic denial of the rights leading to exploitation and misery of the oppressed group. It is a contention among identity politics advocates that this happens both deliberately and unintentionally, negating stated intentions towards the ideals of equality and human rights.

In addition to the imperative of seizing power, which may not be practical, identity politics seeks to establish relationships with existing power structures that its advocates can manipulate to their benefit. The conditions of modern democracy guided by universalist ideals allowed various groups to create mutual associations to further their local interests and allowed them to become defined by these allegiances. Members of groups with allegiance based on personal characteristics often tend to view material, social, political, and spiritual shortfalls in their experiences as arising from their identity-group status. They look to the grand promises of universal equality and rights carved in the marble monuments, and wonder "when does that stuff get here?"[3]

Leftists of a Marxist bent observed during the early 1960s that, while traditional Marxism posited the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the currently most vital left wing movements revolved around matters of race (the civil rights movement) and, somewhat later, sex or gender (see feminism). The New Left originated as a leftist revival that sought to swap in these and other subcultural concerns as substitutes for Marxist class struggle.[4]

The rise of a Neo-Marxist New Left of intellectuals and students[edit]

“”Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of "brotherhood".

The association of identity politics with the American left grew out of a confluence of circumstances in the 1960s. Marxist theory lost much of its attraction for young idealists after the Khrushchev revelations confirmed the worst suspicions about the Soviet Union under Stalin. The unprecedented prosperity of postwar America led left intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills to conclude that the Marxist model of class conflict was irrelevant to issues of social justice in America.

The social milieu of activists had changed from the working class base that was associated with the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The civil rights movement was based in black churches, with support from white and black students and intellectuals. The movement against the Vietnam War and the military draft was associated with the universities and had a natural constituency of young men. At the same time, draft resistance was a rejection of traditionally male roles and manliness, ideas that still had great currency among the working class. The AFL-CIO was seen as a Cold War establishment lapdog. The working class at large was seen as uneducated, apathetic, and backward thinking. They were written off as part of any immediate strategy for social change.[6]

Some more traditional Marxists saw hope that the student/intellectual based movements for peace, racial equality, and later, gender equality, could have a catalytic effect for mobilizing broader support from the working class. Cultural and class biases, and the rise of high-visibility fringe ideologies within those movements, instead led to their estrangement and mutual distrust.

Two competing strategies emerged for the betterment of blacks throughout America; the black nationalism espoused by Malcolm X, and a strategy focused on building cross-racial coalitions that addressed broader issues facing the less-enfranchised sectors of the urban working class as a whole. The former gained popularity among embittered veterans of the civil rights movement such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, among more than a few raving maniacs like Louis Farrakhan, and among white leftists seeking edgy radical credentials. The latter was favored by Martin Luther King, labor organizers, and the more traditional, labor-oriented segments of the left. King was implementing that strategy in Memphis when he was killed.[7][8]

The urban race riots of 1965—1968 polarized those who saw them as a humanitarian, moral, and political disaster and those who saw them as a political opportunity. H. Rap Brown's slogan of "Burn, baby, burn!" was an extreme expression of the response of the emerging black power movement. The spring of 1968 saw the release of the Kerner Commission report[9] on the urban race riots of 1965-1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, which served to reinforce the idea of an irreconcilable racial divide and feed the despair that there could ever be a transformative social movement that crossed racial lines.

The stage was set for the New Left to shift from the idealistic, principled inclusiveness of the civil rights movement to the bitter, cynical, nihilistic parochialism of the black power movement. That led the New Left to overlook some important realities — that there was in fact, a burgeoning black middle class making gains in education, income, and political influence during the 1960s into the 1970s; that the race riots were largely among less educated blacks unable to capitalize on the new opportunities for more educated blacks; that the riots occurred in areas where black political power was ascendant; and that the black power movement was not gaining the allegiance among blacks that the civil rights movement had. The base of the black power movement continued to be black students and intellectuals, with support from white New Leftists.[6]

The 1960s activism fostered the rise of the feminist movement in two ways: it brought large numbers of politically aware women in contact with each other while the machismo-sodden style that the New Left was borrowing from the black power movement in the late 1960s was alienating women.

The identity-based outlook of the black power movement also provided the model for gender-based identity politics that grew out of the New Left. Once the military draft for men ended, it became much easier for women to see their gender as a fundamental condition of oppression.

More recently, gay activists angered by the tepid support of gay issues among blacks and Hispanics proclaimed, "Gay is the new black."[10] And as Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton wrote, in retrospect, regarding homosexuality:[11]

We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppresed people in the society.

The groundswell of political activism in the 1960s left many of those who participated attempting to digest their experiences and lend coherence to their ideas. They were faced with many ad hoc and often conflicting analyses that they were left to sort out. One endeavor was to find philosophical underpinnings that validated experiences people had while organized on the basis of identity groups, and would validate identity as an on-going primary concern. Social constructionism and conflict theory would follow more specific theories centered on race and gender as part of that endeavor.

A key document in the formalization of identity politics as an ideology was the Combahee River Collective Statement,[12] a manifesto published in 1977 by a collective of African-American lesbian feminists who met in Boston between 1974 and 1980. It made the term "identity politics" central to its mission:

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.[12]

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.[12]

A universal assumption is that certain identity groups that are alleged to be historically oppressed are granted automatic moral worth and sympathy as a result. Who is chosen as the most deserving will of course, depend on your perspective.[13] For example, black women may face discrimination within their own racial group while they are out-achieving their male racial cohorts in education and the professions, and while they have greater access than males to government-funded services and experience a lower rate of homelessness. The endeavor to resolve those contradictions led to the presentation of the concept of intersectionality by the black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989. Crenshaw, along with other legal scholars including Derrick Bell and Mari Matsuda, were leaders in formulating critical race theory, advocating race-specific rather than Constitutional approaches to matters of law and policy. Critical legal studies provide much of the underpinnings for ethnic studies and gender studies courses in universities. The entire approach has been criticized for placing ideology and narrative above rigorous consideration of factual evidence.

The tenets of identity politics became popular among student activists in the late 1960s and 1970s, who advocated for policies and curricula favoring identity politics in academia. Identity politics became a growth industry in academia and other institutions. Many of the students who favored identity politics went on to careers in law, social policy, social services, media, teaching, higher education, and nonprofit advocacy groups, all of which became platforms for influence. The influence of identity politics has accordingly been magnified by professional authority, coupled with some shrewd political alliances. In that sense, the power of identity politics is based less on broad-based popularity than it is on its popularity with an educated, influential professional class of policy and opinion makers.

The power base of identity politics advocates has led to criticism that the milieu advocating for "progressive" social policy is an elite class focused on narrow parochial or career interests with an unwillingness to consider broader issues and a propensity for unintended consequences from what they advocate. For example, questioning a policy intended to combat a racial or gender disparity is often dismissed as "racism" or "sexism," even though there may be significant constitutional, legal, or economic issues with the policy being questioned. The frequent use of the courts and bureaucratic imperatives, and more recently such tactics as "de-platforming" on college campuses, to further identity-based causes has been criticized as authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Leftist versions of identity politics are often perceived, especially but not exclusively in the United States, as purely academic movements of an educated elite. Its concerns about imagery and representation, on whose "voices are being heard", is seen as at best alien and irrelevant, and at worst deliberately offensive, by many working and lower class people who do not share its concerns about 'diversity'. A large constituency of socially disadvantaged whites, led to believe that globalization is the cause of their hardships (rather than the massively uneven distribution of wealth, the gutted wellfare state, and mistreatment by Congress) finds the oversimplified concept of 'white privilege' hard to swallow, and conclude — incorrectly, but for understandable reasons — that identity political doctrines are a major cause of their community's losses in jobs and status. Per usual, when socioeconomics are made to take the backseat, the establishment is happy.[14]

Mass media and the entertainment industry frequently promote identity-based themes and go to great lengths to show ethnic and gender diversity, although a large part of that has as much to do with demographic targeting for advertisers as it does with ideology. They are, after all, corporate enterprises for manufacturing consent, to borrow Noam Chomsky's phrase, shepherding people towards points of view that are non-threatening to entrenched interest in the status quo. If that job can be aided by having a "progressive" veneer, so much the better. The gulf remains between mass media imagery and relevance to people's lives.[15] Beyonce with her troupe of Pantherettes at the Super Bowl (she of the weave, they of the nappy) were at best a placebo for race relations. The corporate media and the NFL can congratulate themselves for being daring while the masses get more and more disaffected in the face of social deterioration. This is the Hollywood version of 'liberalism', with celebrities proclaiming their concern for the 'downtrodden' and raking in fabulous sums making irritatingly "transgressive" popular culture while scolding the rest of us about global warming or wearing fur. It provides a highly visible and symbolic object of Republicanpopulist outrage, which in its own version of identity politics portrays its minions as the true Americans, subjected to repeated insult by the alien philosophies of a snobbish and privileged elite.

“”Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future — for itself or others — that triumphs over this pain.

Many of the identities addressed by the more radical identity politicians are social constructions, a fact that makes the harder forms of social constructionism appeal to persons whose political views are shaped by it.

Karl Marx famously advocated that workers should "seize the means of production".[17] In other words, a revolutionary proletariat must — according to Marx — seize control over the physical assets of the capitalist class, violently if need be.

While the problems inherent in this (considerably antiquated) approach are apparent, identity politics — by contrast — swaps in such things as racial or sexual groups, substituting conflict theory for class struggle, and as such moves the focus of leftist activism from the distribution of wealth to the hegemony of competing identities and ideas.

As such, "strong" identity politics could be described as the shoehorning of race, sex, and other social identities into roles better understood in terms of socio-economic class. The resulting steering away of the conversation, from issues of economic power and towards issues of cultural power, makes the establishment happy.

Unsurprisingly, this approach does not sit easily with wide portions of the working left. Indeed, as the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains:[1]

Since its 1970s vogue, identity politics as a mode of organizing and set of political philosophical positions has undergone numerous attacks by those motivated to point to its flaws, whether by its pragmatic exclusions or more programmatically. For many leftist commentators, in particular, identity politics is something of a bête noire, representing the capitulation to cultural criticism in place of analysis of the material roots of oppression.

Marxists, both orthodox and revisionist, and socialists—especially those who came of age during the rise of the New Left in western countries—have often interpreted the perceived ascendancy of identity politics as representing the end of radical materialist critique (see discussions in Farred 2000 and McNay 2008: 126–161). Identity politics, for these critics, is both factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged.

For example, while allowing that both recognition and redistribution have a place in contemporary politics, Nancy Fraser laments the supremacy of perspectives that take injustice to inhere in “cultural” constructions of identity that the people to whom they are attributed want to reject. Such recognition models, she argues, require remedies that “valorize the group's ‘groupness’ by recognizing its specificity”, thus reifying identities that themselves are products of oppressive structures. By contrast, injustices of distribution require redistributive remedies that aim “to put the group out of business as a group” (Fraser 1997: 19).

The social constructionist basis of modern identity politics makes it attractive above all to sheltered academics. Postmodernism and deconstruction, broadly speaking, are its handmaidens.

While a basic concern for issues of representation and social influence is perfectly necessary to all walks of liberal progressivism, more radical identity politicians have a track record of offering absurdly oversimplified interpretations of society — judging, for example, the mix of skin colors of models and actors that appear in advertisements as an important civil rights issue, and views the integration of advertising materials as a significant civil rights victory, rather than as mere tokenism.

Its chief political victories resemble this; "speech codes" and other new forms of etiquette are some of its more conspicuous successes. In essence, identity politics is constantly generating new forms of etiquette. But, since the function of etiquette is to perform social status and rank, and all etiquettes create an underclass of the rude and uncouth[18], identity politics constantly undermines the egalitarianism it aspires to in theory, and as such tends to exaggerate class resentments the more rigorously its new etiquettes are enforced.

Social constructionism invites us to believe that we can change the world by using different words. As such, building on its postmodernist tendencies, identity politics as an academic exercise generates a great deal of jargon.